[COFF] Scribe (Typesetting System) and Unix

[Clem Cole]

On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 11:52 AM Larry McVoy <lm at mcvoy.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 13, 2022 at 04:42:53PM +0000, Lars Brinkhoff wrote:
> > Clem Cole wrote:
> > > I always got the impression that texinfo was more of a shot against
> > > man pages and trying to push the purity of the 'ITS-way' to Unix.
> >
> > ITS had a hypertext documentation system, so my assumtion would be that
> > RMS wanted to bring along that to the GNU vision.  I don't see that's it
> > would be abount purity, whatever that would mean for documentation.
>
> So you know how when you go into someone else's program to fix a bug and
> they have a hideous coding style?  Have you ever had someone else fix a
> bug in your code and they reformat everything so git blame looks like
> they wrote the whole thing?  That's rude, right?  If you were fixing
> the bug in some crappy coding style, you fix it in that crappy coding
> style, it's not your style but it is the polite thing to do.
>
> If we agree on that then we can move on to RMS and texinfo.  Providing
> texinfo docs for Unix commands is like reformatting the code.  It's
> rude.  The Unix way is man pages for basic usage and a user guide,
> usually in -ms.  Not doing it that way is trying to change the way
> the system works and it's just rude.
>
> If I were working on ITS and techinfo is how they do their docs, that's
> how I'd do docs there, it would be rude to force man pages on system
> that doesn't work that way.
>
Amen bro ... Amen
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